Saturday, April 15, 2017

Why President Buhari is Wildly Popular in the Muslim North

Someone suggested a few weeks ago on Facebook that
President Buhari’s irrationally wild popularity in the Muslim north would
require an entire doctoral dissertation to explain. I disagree. It doesn’t
require that much effort to explain. It’s simply the product of a mix of amnesic
nostalgia, visceral emotions, and Muslim clerical tyranny in the north. Here is
what I mean.

Nigerians generally have a predilection for
sentimentalizing the supposed glories of bygone days. The past is always
greener than the present, and the further a memory recedes into the past the
more its putative glories are celebrated and romanticized. Add that to the fact
that Buhari’s first coming was short-lived.

But you can actually map the genealogy of the myth of
Buhari’s “Mai gaskiyaness,” which is the immediate trigger for the worshipful
admiration he enjoys among the masses (and some elites) of the Muslim north. It
started in the year 2001 after former President Obasanjo summoned a Council of
State meeting in the aftermath of the Sharia-inspired sanguinary fury that
drenched Kaduna in oceans of blood.

The Obasanjo
government, speaking through then Vice President Atiku Abubkar, said the
Council of State, of which all past presidents and heads of state are members,
had agreed that all Sharia states should revert to the “status quo ante,” basically meaning they should discontinue the
implementation of Sharia.

Buhari disputed the accuracy of the Obasanjo
government’s rendition of what the Council of State recommended. He said Sharia
didn’t even come up in the discussions of the Council of State. For being the
only person to openly disagree with the Obasanjo government, he began to be
called “Mai Gaskiya.”

Thereafter, he became an open advocate for Sharia and
even went so far as to say the northern Muslim electorate shouldn’t vote anyone
into office who wasn’t committed to Sharia. "I will continue to show
openly and inside me the total commitment to the Sharia movement that is
sweeping all over Nigeria," Buhari said at a seminar organized by the
Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria in August 2001. "God willing, we
will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of the Sharia in the
country."

Although Buhari himself isn’t a deeply religious
person, his open, full-throated but politically motivated (some would say
opportunistic) support for Sharia (at a time no other former president of
northern Nigerian Muslim extraction was willing to do so) caused him to be
wildly popular among northern Muslim masses and the conservative clerical elite
of the region.

Now, Islamic clerics in the north preach that Buhari
is divinely ordained to be president and that criticism of his policies amounts
to blasphemy. That’s why northern Muslim critics of Buhari like me are seen as heretics—or,
worse, not even Muslim at all. I recall a northern Nigerian university teacher
and foreign-based PhD student exclaiming “SubhaanAllaah!” when I first shared my
criticism of Buhari with him during a WhatsApp chat. He was so distraught you
would think I committed blasphemy. So it isn’t just northern Nigerian Muslim masses
that literally worship Buhari.

Given the oversized influence of Islamic clerics in
shaping public opinion in Muslim northern Nigeria, no amount of logic,
evidence-based reasoning, economic hardship, etc. will make the littlest dent
on Buhari’s popularity in the Muslim north.

In his widely shared articled titled, “Advice On
Buhari Media Centre,” Dr. Aliyu Tilde beautifully captured the complicity of
the conservative northern Nigerian Muslim clerical establishment in the
deification of President Buhari.

“The same thing applies to religious leaders who are
invited to the villa (by the President, said one of them) for the same purpose
of propaganda,” Dr. Tilde wrote. “They return and tell their followers all
sorts of stories that they have met an angel there and witnessed miracles at
the foot of Sinai. I just heard a Whatsapp audio of one of them from Sokoto who
was telling his followers, amidst Allahu Akbar, this kind of stories: Buhari ya yi kira. Kuna ga sai a
zauna?…kun san da Nijeriya ba ta da uba. Yanzu na tai uba. Na je villa, na ga
abin ban mamaki… What a shame."

It’s interesting that Buhari was particularly
unpopular with the northern Nigerian Muslim clerical establishment in the 1980s. He
was resented for a number of reasons. His wife then, as now, made sartorial
choices that didn’t conform to the clerics’ expectations of a Muslim woman.
Buhari also banned open-air preaching, stopped/drastically reduced state
sponsorship of Hajj, and forbade the building of new Jumu’ah mosques without
the permission of emirate councils.

This put him at odds with Muslim clerics, particularly
the emergent Izala sect, which now enjoys hegemony in northern Nigeria. Sheikh
Abubakar Mahmood Gumi, in fact, said during a preaching session that “Allah
will not forgive the regimes of Shagari and that of Buhari because they blocked
the way of Allah.”

Fast-forward to the 2000s and Buhari’s support for
Sharia when it wasn’t politically wise to do so, especially by a former head of
state, set the stage for his deification and worship by a clerical elite that a
generation ago invoked curses on him. In a way, Buhari is reaping the
“benefits” of the choices he made in 2001.

Now millions of
people in the Muslim north would rather die than withhold support for Buhari,
however much his government’s policies, or lack thereof, smolder them. Support
for Buhari in the Muslim north isn’t just politics; it’s now religion. There is no
precedent for this in Nigeria’s history.

Emir
Sanusi II as President?

I picked up on the cryptic but devastating critique of
Kano State Governor Ganduje’s government in Emir Sanusi’s wildly trending Kaduna
speech and wonder if the emir is still interested in his job.

Remember that
the power to appoint and dethrone traditional rulers rests exclusively with
state governors. Now, pissing off the federal government AND the state
government AND an entire region’s conservative cultural elites with bitter,
uncomfortable truth-telling is a lethally combustible mix.

I make no pretenses to possessing oracular powers
(because I don't), but I predict that, like his grandfather, Emir Sanusi II
will be deposed. But, unlike his grandfather, he may end up becoming Nigeria’s
president after his dethronement. Kano’s loss would then be Nigeria’s gain (or
loss, depending on how he would turn out), which, in a strangely circuitous
way, would also be Kano’s gain (or loss) since Kano is part of Nigeria.

Sanusi shouldn’t be Kano’s emir; he should be
Nigeria’s president. I have strong disagreements with the neoliberal orthodoxy
he subscribes to and his feudal and elitist detachment from the plight of the
poor, but it would be nice to have a truly informed and educated man as
president for once.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.